Category: Uncategorized

Waymo’s Early Days

The early days of the Google Self-Driving Car Project were not that long ago — only 7 years ago, at the beginning of the decade. But that was before the self-driving car goldrush, back when Uber was only operating a limousine service, and before Lyft even existed. A lot can change in 7 years.

The New Yorker goes back to the early days to investigate, in particular, Anthony Levandowski’s days at Google. Levandowski earned $120 million from his time at Uber, but The New Yorker reports that his time was replete with controversy.

“Hiring could take months,” Levandowski told me. “There was a program called WorkforceLogic, and just getting people into the system was super-complicated. And so, one day, I put ads on Craigslist looking for drivers, and basically hired anyone who seemed competent, and then paid them out of my own pocket. It became known as AnthonyforceLogic.” Around this time, Levandowski went to an auto dealership and bought more than a hundred cars. One of his managers from that period told me, “When we got his expense report, it was equal to something like all the travel expenses of every other Google employee in his division combined. The accountants were, like, ‘What the hell?’ But Larry said, ‘Pay it,’ and so we did. Larry wanted people who could ignore obstacles and could show everyone that you could do something that seemed impossible if you looked for work-arounds.”

Worth a read.

Uber To Resume Testing Self-Driving Cars on Public Roads

Uber has requested permission to resume testing self-driving cars on public roads in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As I write on Forbes.com:

“In conjunction with Uber’s request to resume testing autonomous vehicles on public roads, Uber also published a safety report, a letter on safety from CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and a summary of internal and external safety reviews. Uber also linked to the full 56-page external safety review completed by the law firm LeClairRyan.

Read the post to learn about the many improvements Uber has made and is making to its safety procedures.

Ridesharing Moves Toward Subscriptions

In the last few weeks, both Lyft and Uber rolled out (very different) subscription pricing models.

Lyft’s All-Access Plan offers 30 rides per 30 days (up to $15 per ride) for $299. This is basically a bulk purchase option. A Lyft power user would save $150 per month by subscribing instead of paying per ride. (30 rides * $15 per ride— $299 subscription price =$151 savings)

Uber’s Ride Pass, by contrast, is essentially insurance against surge pricing. For $14.99 per month, Uber users escape the risks of surge pricing, plus they save approximately 15% off of normal fares. A user would probably need to spend $100 or more per month on Uber to come out ahead.

Each of these offers is a tiny, baby step toward all-you-can-eat subscription ridesharing. The marginal cost of each ride probably prohibits Lyft and Uber from diving headfirst into all-you-can-eat ridesharing. Hopefully self-driving cars will lower that marginal cost to the point that it becomes feasible.

My first professional job was with America Online, now AOL. I joined as a college intern in 2001, but there were still veterans around who could recall AOL’s switch from hourly to unlimited pricing.

22 years ago, AOL switched from plans that allowed for metered hourly Internet usage to plans that allowed unlimited Internet access. The pricing change brought in a wave of new customers, along with per-user usage increases that overwhelmed AOL’s infrastructure. It was one of the most significant things AOL ever did.

Ridesharing is getting closer to its all-you-can-eat moment.

KPIT Sponsors 500 Self-Driving Car Scholarships For India

Aspiring Self-Driving Car Engineers in India, apply today for the opportunity to work on autonomous vehicles, regardless of your financial situation!

KPIT, one of India’s leading automotive software suppliers, just announced they are sponsoring 500 scholarships for Indian students to take Udacity’s Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program!

Apply now for the scholarship!

Since we launched the Nanodegree program two years ago, we have seen tremendous interest from students in India who want to learn about autonomous vehicles. Many of the Indian students who have enrolled in the Nanodegree program now work on autonomous vehicles at great Indian companies like KPIT, Ola, and Hi-Tech Robotics.

The KPIT Scholarships will provide the opportunity for any student in India to work on self-driving cars, regardless of their financial situation.

KPIT is making a tremendous investment in Indian software engineers. We are delighted to be able to work with Kishor Patil and the KPIT team to make this possible!

Ford and Volkswagen Take Self-Driving International

My latest post on Forbes.com discusses recent announcements from both Ford and Volkswagen to take their self-driving cars abroad.

“In recent days both Ford and Volkswagen have announced plans to work on self-driving vehicles outside of their home markets. In Ford’s case, the target market is Beijing, whereas the Volkswagen effort will take place in Israel.”

The ventures are different, and offer distinct insights into each company’s approach to autonomous vehicles. But the move to new markets may have a common inspiration.

“By launching self-driving cars in other markets, automotive companies might be able to stand out and gain local advantages, instead of racing to catch up to Waymo in the US market.”

Much more on Forbes.com.

Image-Quality Lidar and Laser-Accurate Cameras

A lidar startup named Innovusion recently raised $30MM to deliver “image-quality” lidar. As optics.org points out, several different startups are racing to build laser-based autonomous vehicle sensors: Luminar, AEye, Quanergy, Oryx, Velodyne (the industry-standard), and surely a few others.

Credit to Innovusion, though: “image-quality lidar” really frames the issue in a way that I hadn’t seen before. Cost aside, is it really possible to replace cameras with lidar?

Watching the Innovusion demo video, the answer seems to be “closer, but not yet”. The quality of the lidar scan is terrific. However, “image quality” isn’t quite right. Signs appear in the video and are illegible, and at least to my eyes the traffic signal was not classifiable.

It’s exciting to see how much work is being done to push lidar resolution to a point that it is competitive with cameras.

It would also be exciting to see cameras develop their measurement abilities to compete with lidar and radar. Generally, cameras are terrific for detection and classification tasks, but they measure distances, heights, and other dimensions poorly.

And while many startups are jumping into the lidar space, comparatively fewer are working on perception with cameras. That work tends to be left to academic researchers, automotive manufacturers, and Tier 1 suppliers. Mobileye, the most prominent automotive computer vision specialty company (now part of Intel), has mostly been quiet about their computer vision work.

With so many companies pushing lidar resolution to camera-like levels, there might be an opening for some computer vision startups to push camera measurements to lidar-like levels.

Navigate on Autopilot

On Friday, the Tesla blog announced the introduction of the Navigate feature to its Enhanced Autopilot system. Navigate will drive from exit-to-exit on the highway, and automatically change lanes to pass vehicles along the way.

Near the top of the post, Tesla writes, “until truly driverless cars are validated and approved by regulators, drivers are responsible for and must remain in control of their car at all times.”

That is a prominent disclaimer, but this feature basically looks like Level 3 partial autonomy. Depending on how aggressively Tesla requires drivers to keep their hands on the wheel, it’s not hard to imagine drivers diverting their attention elsewhere.

And that could be a great thing!

Tesla could start out by requiring drivers to basically keep their hands on the wheel at all times. Over time, as the software proves itself, Tesla could use over-the-air updates to slowly relax the requirements that drivers monitor the road.

Of course, Tesla could botch the rollout and cause lots of distracted driving accidents. But so far Tesla Autopilot has a great safety record, so I feel pretty good about this.

As the blog post notes, “Since we launched Autopilot in 2015, more than 1 billion miles of real-world driving data have been used to support the feature.”

Argo AI To Test in DC

The Washington Post reports that Ford Motor Company and Argo AI have announced they will begin testing self-driving cars in Washington, DC, next year.

This is exciting to me as a Ford alumnus, and because I grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, so I know the city well.

Beyond my personal connections, this just seems like another step in the increasingly rapid expansion of self-driving vehicles to more and more cities.

Lyft and Aptiv are testing with the general public Las Vegas right now, as is Drive.AI in the Dallas suburbs.

Uber has tested in Pittsburgh in the past, and probably will test again in the future, as has nuTonomy in Boston.

Waymo says they will open their Phoenix-area fleet to the general public this year. Cruise will open their fleet to the public in San Francisco next year. Now Ford says they will open to the public in Washington, DC.

New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston are the four largest cities in America. Presumably self-driving cars will get there in the next few years, too.

Regulators Block Self-Driving School Bus

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shut down a self-driving school bus pilot program in Florida. The pilot was run by the French firm Transdev, and involved a small shuttle that travels at a glacial 8mph. To put that in context, the average Boston marathoner runs faster than this shuttle.

There’s a little bit of back and forth jawing between NHTSA, which says, “Using a non-compliant test vehicle to transport children is irresponsible, inappropriate, and in direct violation of the terms of Transdev’s approved test project.”

Transdev, for its part, Transdev “believed the pilot met the requirements of the testing and demonstration project approved by NHTSA for adults and children to ride on the same route.”

Realistically, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting hurt at 8mph. I mean, it’s possible, but the speed is so slow.

On the other hand, painting a self-driving shuttle yellow and calling it a school bus is basically inviting a public outcry, at least at this point in the development of autonomous vehicles. If the purpose of the trial was to demonstrate that adults and children can ride in a vehicle together, it seems like there are several intermediate steps to hit before calling anything a school bus.

There’s also relatively little to gain by automating school buses. Buses are remarkably safe. And since the cost of the driver is amortized over all of the passengers, the financial benefits of automation are low.